Once More: Minimalism, Maximalism, and Objectivity

In the first decade of this century, a series of monographs and essays entered into the so-called Maximalist/Minimalist debate from a
third way.1 This new
perspective called biblical scholars and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists to developments in historical theory of the late
20th century, especially to the work of decisive significance for contemporary historical theory2
of Hayden White and Dominic LaCapra.3 The
value of these post-modern historical theorists was in moving us beyond Rankean notions of historicity and
proof. Moore, Miller, and Banks argued that the minimalists and maximalists alike perpetuated Ranke's goal of empirical
objectivity - wie es eigentlich gewesen  as Smelik had already noted.4
In both the minimalist and maximalist cases, probability or plausibility did not matter. It was thus a total
misnomer to dub the minimalists post-modern.5

But historical theory had not ceased development with the deconstructionist post-moderns. By the 1990s, New Cultural
History was in full swing with the work of Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, Peter Burke, and Carlo Ginzburg. By bringing their
methods and ideas to bear on ancient Israel, Moore and Miller pushed for writing histories that were well-argued plausibilities,
possible pasts, which are available to further testing and examination and which challenge other possible pasts, yielding
better-informed reconstructions.6

It would seem that little attention has been paid to this third voice by either maximalists or minimalists. One must search
hard among the writings of those who might most be expected to have methodological perspicuity for any discussion of White or LaCapra,
yet along the New Cultural History. Rankean objectivity seems to remain the goal, even if the results are a miniscule amount that can
be said of pre-exilic Israel.7

Philip Davies makes a passing reference to Hayden White,8
although in contrast to the post-deconstructionist New Cultural History, he insists that plausibility is not a valid criterion:
The assessment of probability in individual cases is, if not futile, then at least only calculable in a very general measure."9
One must therefore adopt the appropriate degree of a priori doubt or confidence regarding biblical historicity in general.10
Graeme Auld does consistently disavow proof and present his reconstructions as reconstructions.11
And another of the Copenhagen School, Helge Kvanvig, has studied White quite extensively; although it is unclear her voice
has been heard, either.12 John Van
Seters remains insistent: there is no post-scientific history.13

To be sure, some maximalist scholars have appealed to post-modernism, but, as will be shown below, in order to give
credence to the biblical accounts of history as possible pasts and to justify their own ideological commitments within the general
awareness that every scholar has an ideological commitment or two.14
Proof continues to be their desideratum.15

One should not overlook the fact that historians of the middle  neither maximalist nor minimalist  have
continued to treat history as a scientific or logical positivist method.16
But one happy outcome of both the maximalist-minimalist debate and, hopefully to a certain extent the voice of the third way,
has been the move of the discipline to a hyper-focus on methodology.17

While biblical scholars and archaeologists have drawn out this debate, the field of historical theory has been moving forward. New
Cultural History of the 1990s is no longer the mainstay of university departments of history or theoretical journals. The
hegemonizing and imperializing fraction of the discipline that was New Cultural History is widely criticized,18
although Chartier and others continue to practice and defend it.19
Now no one denies the contributions of New Cultural History or its deconstructionist forbearers. There has been no return to the days
before Foucault and Derrida, as Dever has wished.20
Chartier is correct:

The biggest contribution of cultural history was forcing historians to question their seemingly strongest convictions. Against the hard
truth of facts, it set their construction by the clashing representations of actors. Against the postulation that ideas, doctrines,
texts and images have intrinsic meaning, it affirmed the historicity of those meanings, wholly dependent on their materiality.
Suddenly, the research practices, criteria of proof and models of historical understanding were completely changed.21

Nevertheless, nearly a decade after Miller, Moore, and Banks, some things need to be said differently by this third way.22
A good starting point is the accusation that maximalist and minimalist alike were positivists, bent on objectivity. It is clear now
that there are probably three, if not four different kinds of objectivity at work in contemporary history writing on ancient Israel.
The objectivity the minimalists seek is not the same as that of the maximalists. And the difference is not as simple as Bible is
true until proven otherwise vs. Bible is false until proven otherwise. Allan Megills four types of objectivity
are a useful matrix.23

Leopold von Ranke's goal was absolute empirical objectivity . . .wie es eigentlich gewesen(simply as it actually
happened; Ranke omitted the final war or ist in his preface to Histories of the Latin and
Germanic Nations from 1494-1514 [1824]).24
History was to be divorced from philosophy, and only those periods for which there were facts should be considered. This kind of
Gods-eye view, view from nowhere, aperspectival perspective, Olympian neutrality25
has really not been anybodys aim in writing the history of ancient Israel for the past century.

The objectivity goal of, say, Keith Whitelam or Thomas Thompson,26
is Procedural Objectivity. Such historiography values totally impersonal procedures with the intent of
avoiding all subjective sources of error. Values avoidance of error as highly as the discovery of truth. Seeks to exclude all
subjectivity.27 Thus, Davies will
admit that all historians are biased and prone to subjective historiography, and so claims to use a historical method that is itself
objective to arrive at the objective reality of the past.28
E. A. Knauf and others appeal to the philosopher of science Karl Popper in their quest for such objective methods,29
and Megill identifies the appeal to Popper as characteristic of this kind of objectivity.30
But, as Megill points out, Procedural objectivity tries to maintain the letter of absolute objectivity while denying its
spirit  using the impersonal means that absolute objectivity recommends, but turning agnostic with regard to the hoped-for end,
the attainment of truth.31

The maximalists objectivity, on the other hand, is Dialectical Objectivity. This aims to interact with the
object and, ideally, to commune with it (and possibly also with its creators). Seeks to harness subjectivity, making it a positive
force for the discovery and advance of knowledge.32
That final (incomplete) sentence could have been written by Iain Provan. The history-writing of Provan, Long, and Longman sees the
faith commitment of the interpreter  foregrounded as an act of post-modernism  to be a positive advantage in writing
Israels history.33 The scholar who
can share the biblical prophets view of history will be best able to advance knowledge of that history.34

But in practice, this has amounted to treating the biblical text innocent until proven guilty, or accurate until proven
erroneous.35 And it is not that we
should see it guilty until proven innocent, but that what this quote really means is narrative material is to be
taken as the genre history until proven otherwise, except that there is an unwillingness to examine the genre
question. We are left with what Dever called, rational paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible.36

This is not to negate the accusation that minimalists, too, have an ideological commitment.37
But it is not post-modernism, nor is it anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, leftism, post-Evangelical angst, or any of the other nihilisms
with which they have been tagged.38
Rather, it is the old German progressive worldview.39
Herman Paul explains, Historicism thus offered a worldview that embedded experiences of change in a narrative of progressive
development.40 This comes in two
forms. Narrowly, historicism assumed that history-writing has progressed from its primitive state in ancient Israel to the apogee of
modern scholarship.41 In the irony that
White criticized twenty years ago, we failed to see that both their history and ours are fictive and language-constructed, and our
historiography is anything but metaphysically neutral42
Thus Emanuel Pfoh can be quite critical of Ranke and his legacy (and thus of absolute objectivity), but embraces the ironic disparity
between our scientific historiography and the narratively-embedded biblical historiography.43
The second form of historicisms worldview is the grand narrative itself. Minimalists, too, seek to trace the grand swathe of
history, merely moving the starting point for what we can really know progressively later,44
since the procedure of its Procedural Objectivity is understanding biblical narrative[s] to illuminate the time in
which they were written.45

There is a fourth objectivity, Megills Disciplinary Objectivity. This seeks to contain subjectivity:
accepts only the (unacknowledged) subjectivity of the discipline (subfield, research network, etc.).46
Although William Dever is not quite an objectivist,47
this does remind one of Devers continual protest that the minimalists are out of their discipline. They are not
archaeologists, and are therefore not competent to use archaeological findings in their historical reconstructions.48
The discipline of Syro-Palestinian archaeology is thus characterized by canonized knowledge, which is imparted as certain
knowledge  as a coherent and stable body of knowledge,49
presumably known only to the former students of Dever himself or of Lawrence Stager. But, as Megill writes, Disciplinary
objectivity-claims are also products of epistemology insecurity. They are likely to arise only when the faith in one indivisible
truth that accompanies absolute objectivity seems unsustainable, and when there are doubts the reliability of personal vision.50
Biblical scholarship is by nature both history and literary criticism, philology and archaeology, which itself ought to be anthropology,
as well. As historians in general have discovered, We do not believe that there are monopolies of wisdom, nor zones of knowledge
reserved to persons with particular university degree.51

Must we, then, try to avoid four kinds of objectivity instead of merely one? Not quite. Objectivity is not neutrality because
some measure of commitment is necessary if we are to see the historical object at all (thus, gender issues in history were
not seen until some historians developed a commitment to feminism).52
But in contrast to overemphasis of objectivity, we will need to bring presuppositions. Historical inquiry requires some
conception of how human beings relate to their variable social contexts, and of the nature of and the differences between these
contexts. In other words, it requires a social theory.53

Moreover, also in contrast to ultra-objectivity, Historians must speculate. The alternative is to have no history at all,
but only collections of facts. Accordingly, the question to be asked is not Should historians speculate? Rather, it is How
should they speculate? Our contention  perhaps naïve in its simplicity, and certainly simple in its naïveté  is
that they ought to speculate honestly and intelligently.54
This means accepting whatever historical reconstruction best makes sense of the historical record.55
Megill explains, The degree of certainty attributable to a set of beliefs about the past corresponds to the degree to which
adopting those beliefs would serve to make sense of the totality of the historical record.56
Making sense means consilience (the more data explained by an explanation, the better); [and] simplicity (the fewer
auxiliary hypotheses necessary to make the explanation work, the better).57

Thus, the explanation for the abundant parallels of certain parts of the Hebrew Bible with Neo-Assyrian royal propaganda that explains
the greatest number of these parallels and requires the least convoluted explanation is that authors in 7th-century Judah
were aware of and using Neo-Assyrian literature and iconography.58
A hypothesis that the texts in question are all Hellenistic compositions is neither consilient nor simple.59

A third criterion is that we ought to expect history to be firmly rooted in seeking out the causes of known events rather than
deducing the consequences of some set of events.60
When we look at a given period and try to explain it, we are allowed to remind ourselves of what happened in a subsequent period.
Lemche calls this a hermeneutic circle,61
but we can use such ex post facto knowledge to aid our understanding of what came before. Thus, if there is a direct continuity
from the Iron I highlands of Palestine to Iron II Israel and Judah in pottery, settlement pattern, architecture, burial practices, and
metallurgy,62 and the Merneptah Stele tells
us that some entity in the general vicinity in Iron I was called Israel, it would be sensible to reason from effects
to causes and connect the two.63

Our reconstructions will be modest and tentative.64
If they are in contradiction with each other, we need not wholly reject them, as it is quite possible to subscribe tentatively to two or more
inconsistent hypotheses while admitting their inconsistency.65
And, of course, many are already doing these things and fully understand this. Lester Grabbe, for example, has explicitly summoned us
to such methods.66 But I do not think it
is so far from the advice given by David Noel Freedman fifty years ago:

First, there is the accumulation of a body of data, and the refinement of techniques of investigation and interpretation. . . . Second,
along with the accumulation of useful data is the formulation of working hypotheses which serve to collate, organize, systematic the
knowledge, to bridge the gaps, to develop a structure of thought, and to provide an overall view, essential to a proper perspective in
biblical studies. . . . It is only important to remember that all hypotheses are working proposals until confirmed in detail, and that
many must be discarded while others will require drastic overhauling in the face of new evidence.67

Notes

1
For a thorough and fair survey of the Maximalist-Minimalist debate, see Lester L. Grabbe, Ancient Israel: What do we know and
how do we know it? (New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 21-35.

22
A guess at the latest movement in historical theory would be History of Concepts; Elías José Palti, From Ideas to Concepts to
Metaphors, History and Theory 49 (2010): 194-211, esp. 197-98, 202; Irmline Veit-Brause, The Interdisciplinarity
of History of Concepts, History of Concepts Newsletter 6 (2003): 8-13. But there is no need to jump on this bus that
has barely set out.

36
William G. Dever, Who were the early Israelites and where did they come from? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 224. Examples
are catalogued in Robert D. Miller II, Quest of the Historical Israel, Dictionary of the Old Testament Historical
Books, 832-33.

40
Herman Paul, Who Suffered from the Crisis of Historicism? History and Theory 49 (2010): 173.

41
Davies, Methods, 703; Davies, Biblical Israel in the Ninth Century? in Understanding the History of
Ancient Israel, ed. H. G. M. Williamson (Proceedings of the British Academy 143; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 53,
where he laments the slower progress in North America.

Comments (4)

Just a first note--are preparing to get to Copenhagen for today's meetings: The real tragedy was perhaps that we got involved in this senseless debate minimalist-maximalist controversy. Really, what is going on is a kind of putting the fragmented bits and pieces together. But forget for a moment the quest for historicity that has really always been a problem for the study of biblical narrative. Bob's reflections are fine, generally, and shows the enormous hermeneutical advances which have occurred over the last generation. When I more than 30 years ago was preparing for "Early Israel" I was shocked because of the lack of methodical reflections in "histories" of ancient Israel.

However, the historical question remains: When there was no exodus, no conquest, and the period of the judges reduced to an heroic age, the monarchy of David and Solomon gone, when the idea of the 12 tribes a myth, when the exile deconstructed as one among many, an exile that probably never ended, a return that was not a return, what, then, do we find in biblical narrative? Cultural memory many would say at the present, but here the methodological discussion is only beginning (and as usual in our business fifteen years after the "memory boom" in other sectors of the Academy).

We must, however, understand that all periods of Israel's "history" as told by the OT are memory. We do not have any contemporary description of what is happening. This applies to the stories of Ezra and Nehemiah as well as to those of Moses and Miriam. We do not have anything like the letters of Paul. So the object is really whose memory? Sound like a good title for a book.

Niels Peter Lemche

#1 - Niels Peter Lemche - 05/06/2011 - 01:23

More Notes on Miller-a
New history is in one way a continuation of Nora and le Goff, and basically a spin-off from les Annales school. Some elements included in new history belongs to the branch of cultural studies which I opposed to in my "System theory" and in Early Israel. It sounds very much like "new archaeology" and the kind of history attached to it. Much more about it in my Early Israel from 1985.
However, the involvement with cultural memory studies is necessary, but does not need to lead to the result proposed by Robert Miller. I will address this question in several places in the next few years. Some are already in print, thus "Solomon as Cultural Memory" to be published in a volume on cultural memory edited by Diana Edelman and Ehud Ben Zvi.
By the way, who said that the Copenhagen School was/is post-modern? William Dever was probably the first followed by other people in his company. But does Dever understand what post-modernism is? To him post-modernism is just a malarkey to be scorned, and because he does not like the Copenhagen School, it must in his optic be post-modern.
Miller's argument is very much referring to the traditional one entertained by historians that we don't know anything about history; we are always reconstructing it (Lucien Febvre). I have said the same a number of times Or rather that we construct it. This does not mean that I/we accept that everything is possible. Following this kind of logic, we may put forward a series of assertions about life on Venus. We cannot know before we are there. Everything is possible within the confines of the available facts, which are always interpreted, but it does not say that they are not there.
Ironically Popper mentioned among the many names in Miller's contribution was reckoned as neo-objectivist. And what does he do here if this is Miller's opinion: "It is only important to remember that all hypotheses are working proposals until confirmed in detail." Popper talked about falsification and not confirmation. An important difference.
Miller can imagine whatever he want to and believe his imagination to be probable. However, if he imagines a King David in the 10th century, and there is not Jerusalem likely to house a king of this biblical magnitude, then we talk about—maybe—cultural memory, but cultural memory or if you prefer collective memory is not history. Here the recent tsunami of readers by Boyce, Olick, Erll, Radstone, and more are a good place to begin. And the discussion of history and cultural memory in Cubitt, is worth following up. There is a lot of "if's" in Bob Miller's article, but I have never wanted to take part in guesswork.
Another example: If the Persian Period is to be considered the time of the formation of biblical tradition, then we have problems, in case Finkelstein and Ussishkin are right about the date of the rebuilding of so-called post-exilic Jerusalem: It did not happen before after 200 BCE. That we have the imaginations about Ezra and Nehemiah and—not to forget—Esther does not change this bruta facta.
It is funny that Na'aman appears in this connection. He will be the last person to be placed in connection with "new history". If anything Na'aman is a hardcore classical historian in the good ole German style.
Among the many new trends within history we also have contra-factual history, but it is probably not what Miller wants to present a plea for.
Some part of this new discussion about history is to say that everything is possible, which really means that everything I believe in is possible, and then we soon arrive at Ian Provan's and his people's door and the new "evangelical" histories.

#2 - Niels Peter Lemche - 05/07/2011 - 12:15

B:
As a former chancellor of our university once told me: He wanted the department of history to be part of a benchmarking test project. They declined: We know nothing about history. The chancellor's answer was: How can you then evaluate an examination? It is already belonging to the unknown past. The chancellor came from medicine.
It should be noted: not a word in Millar's article about Jan Assmann! Or for that matter the discussion following the "memory boom" of collective memory in the sense of Maurice Halbwachs and his followers, in France mainly from les Annales group. Mark Bloch was a friend of Halbwachs and wrote the first review (positive) of Halbwachs' first study on collective memory, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), published for the first time in Olick's reader.
The relationship between history and memory is really a hot potato, and not solved. The same involves oral tradition, and there is a renewed interest in oral tradition among historians, but they have not succeeded in getting past the generation problem, that most traditions vanish when grandpa dies, which says that such memories are shallow, not reaching more than say 75 years back.
The basic mistake in Miller's contribution—as it is in much literature about the Old Testament, ancient Israel and collective/cultural memory—is the assumption that we have the memory of ancient Israel. This is wrong. We might have the memory about ancient Israel. The Old Testament is not ancient Israel. It is a story about ancient Israel. Then we can start to more into historical analyses of this memory, be it new history or some old kind of it. This is basically belonging to the historian's craft and will at the end depend on whatever kind of sources which are available. The results will of course be subjective as all human activity is. But it does not mean that everything is "good" history.
Literature:
Pascal Boyer & James V. Wertsch (udg), Memory in Mind and Culture (Cambridge: University Press, 2009)
Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: University Press, 2007)
Astrid Erll & Ansgar Nünning (udg.), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010)
Israel Finkelstein, "Jerusalem in the Persian (and Early Hellenistic) Period and the Wall of Nehemiah," JSOT 32 (2008), pp. 501-30
——"Persian Period Jerusalem and Yehud: A Rejoinder," Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9/24 (2009)
——"The Territorial Extent and Demography of Yehud/Judea in the Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods," RB 117 (2010), pp. 39-54.
Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1994)
Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)
Niels Peter Lemche, Early Israel. Anthropological and Historical Studi¬es on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 37, Leiden, Brill, 1985, 496 s.
——"On the Use of ‘System Theory’, ‘Macro Theories’ and Evolutionistic Thinking in Mo¬dern OT Research and Biblical Archaeology," Scandinavian Journal of the Old Te¬stament 1990/2, 73 88 also in Charles E. Car¬ter og Carol L. Meyers (eds.), Community, Identity, and Ideology. Social Sciences Approaches to the Hebrew Bible. Sources for Biblical and Theological Studies 6 (Winona Lake, IN, 1996), 273-286
Pierre Nora (ed.), Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Memoire (series of essays in many volumes published in a rather confusing order).
Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi & Daniel Levy (udg.), The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: University Press, 2011)
Susannah Radstone & Bill Schwarz (udg.), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010)
David Ussishkin, "The Borders and De Facto Size of Jerusalem in the Persian Period," in Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming (eds.), Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006), pp. 147-166
Niels Peter Lemche

#3 - Niels Peter Lemche - 05/07/2011 - 12:15

Causes are divided into necessary and sufficient. The existence of anything, proves the existence, prior in time, of everything that counts as necessary cause of X and also proves the existence, later in time, of everything of which X is sufficient cause. But the existence of X does not prove the existence, prior in time, of all the possibly sufficient causes, since only one (some or other) of them is necessary, and we may not know which. Nor does it prove the existence, later in time, of everything for which X is necessary, since X alone may not be sufficient for any of these.

X here is the expansion of a way of life from highlands in Iron I to a wider area in Iron II then we might plausibly say that it must have been necessary for some or other, not for some specific, community to have existed in the highlands to pioneer that way of life. We know that several communities, of which one was called Israel, existed 'in the general area', so we do not - as far as this evidence goes - know that Israel played the crucial part in events, or even how distinct Israel was from the other communities whom Merneptah says he has subdued.

We can conjecture that Israel was the key player or by contrast that there was no key player but it is important when it comes to conjectures to think what we would accept as falsifying them. Otherwise we would be insisting rather than conjecturing.

#4 - Martin - 05/08/2011 - 16:41

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